by Ton Zijlstra

Tag Archives: World Bank

These past days I was in Astana, Kazachstan. Next to enjoying the tremendous hospitality of the Kazachs, and being impressed with their sense of pride and urge to succeed, I spent my time sharing my open government data experiences of the past 6 years.

The World Bank asked me to keynote at a roundtable with CIO and CTO level officials of a dozen or so CIS countries, at the Kazakh national information technology unit (NITEC) in the House of Ministries (a gigantic building).

At the CIO/CTO of CIS countries roundtable in what seemed the Star Trek Enterprise command deck

In the two days after that, at the invitation of the Kazakh government and the ICT Development Fund, I contributed to the Global e-Gov Forum 2014. It is the third event of its kind, the first two having taken place in Korea (the next ones will be in Kazachstan and Singapore). At the conference I contributed to two workshops, one for UNDESA, presenting how our current project with the Province of North Holland on open data is a catalyst voor civic engagement and (e-)participation. The key message being that publishing data is an intervention in your policy area, that not just addresses the information assymetry between me and my government, but als provides me with a tool to act differently on my own behalf. Both these elements are ultimately impacting government policy goals which is a basis for a governments intrinsic motivation to do open data well. Transparency builds trust and putting data on the table enables frank conversations that would otherwise not be possible. The other was basically the same message, this time in a panel discussion that also contained the CIO of the Dutch Ministry for Interior Affairs, the department in charge of e-government and open government. That made for a nice combination with both overlap and contrasts, juxtaposing national policy with the perspective from individual civil servants trying to do things in practice.

Discussing the operational aspects and impact of using open data for civic engagement

I also chaired the final panel discussion on open government and open data, which contributions from the UN, the French and Kazakh national open data units (ETALAB & NITEC), and a research firm. With a thousand people from almost 80 countries this was a great event to exchange experiences, and I heard a range of great stories from Uruguay to Kenya, from Barbados to Bangladesh, from Estonia to Vietnam.

In panel discussion, and the UNDESA workshop room

Being a VIP guest of the Kazakh government took a bit of getting used to, as I am usually one to arrange my own things. Having a personal assistant plus a dedicated driver with a very luxurious car at my disposal for three days full time does however have its advantages. As does being whisked through airport and border security in under 5 minutes both ways. It meant being able to fully focus on delivering value to the various sessions and audiences, and engage in meaningful conversations, without having to worry about any of the logistics.

I have been visiting the World Bank the past days to discuss various open data projects, e.g. in Kenya, Moldova and Tunisia.
During one of the meetings, an informal one during lunch, we discussed the challenges we see for open data in the coming time.
These are the challenges I mentioned as seeing become (more) relevant at the moment, looking forward.

Turning open data into a policy instrument for government bodies, so that government needs open data for their own policy efforts. This is putting open data forward to:

cut budgets

measure impact

stimulate participaton

have others through app building contribute to policy aims

re-use data of other PSB’s

Increasing the skills and ‘literacy’ of citizens and re-users around open data. The original open data activists have the data they wanted, so we need to grow the group of people who wants data. That means also increasing the number of people who can (or see how they can) work with data.

Getting government bodies to work together across borders the way citizens already do. Coders are networked across the EU, and work together. Public sector bodies are bound to jurisdictions, and connections are routed through higher hierarchical levels, not at operational level, where practical matters are at hand, and where open data could be brought forward.

Stimulating corporations to open data, in contrast or complementary to published government data. Stimulating citizen generated or citizen shared data.

Measuring policy impact in two ways: by making impact visible in connected data sets, that exist before, during and after policy implementation for non-open data policies, and by collecting stories plus their metadata around open data related policies to measure the non-economical impact of open data.

Making sure that the notion of what ‘real’ open data is remains intact when the technology becomes less visible as it disappears under the hood of the applications that use open data and where users of those applications may not realize it is based on open government data. (much in the same way it is necessary to keep the importance of an open and free, dumb at the core, smart at the edges, internet in the awareness of people, because that is what drives the affordances we value in much of the things we do over the internet)

I have been visiting the World Bank the past days to discuss various open data projects, e.g. in Kenya, Moldova and Tunisia.
During one of the meetings, an informal one during lunch, we discussed the challenges we see for open data in the coming time.

These are the challenges I mentioned as seeing become (more) relevant at the moment, looking forward.

Turning open data into a policy instrument for government bodies, so that government needs open data for their own policy efforts. This is putting open data forward to:

cut budgets

measure impact

stimulate participaton

have others through app building contribute to policy aims

re-use data of other PSB’s

Increasing the skills and ‘literacy’ of citizens and re-users around open data. The original open data activists have the data they wanted, so we need to grow the group of people who wants data. That means also increasing the number of people who can (or see how they can) work with data.

Getting government bodies to work together across borders the way citizens already do. Coders are networked across the EU, and work together. Public sector bodies are bound to jurisdictions, and connections are routed through higher hierarchical levels, not at operational level, where practical matters are at hand, and where open data could be brought forward.

Stimulating corporations to open data, in contrast or complementary to published government data. Stimulating citizen generated or citizen shared data.

Measuring policy impact in two ways: by making impact visible in connected data sets, that exist before, during and after policy implementation for non-open data policies, and by collecting stories plus their metadata around open data related policies to measure the non-economical impact of open data.

Making sure that the notion of what ‘real’ open data is remains intact when the technology becomes less visible as it disappears under the hood of the applications that use open data and where users of those applications may not realize it is based on open government data. (much in the same way it is necessary to keep the importance of an open and free, dumb at the core, smart at the edges, internet in the awareness of people, because that is what drives the affordances we value in much of the things we do over the internet.

About

Weblog since 2002 by Ton Zijlstra.
European citizen in a networked world. Based in the Netherlands, living in Europe, working globally. There are no Others. There is just me and many of you.

I write about how our digital and networked world changes how we work, learn, decide and organize. I explore the tools and strategies that help us navigate the networked world.
I am passionate about increasing people's ability to act (knowledge), and their ability to change (learning). Key-words: open data, open government, fablabs, making, complexity, agency.